Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pledged today to devote "every ounce of my energy to protect network neutrality" and told ISPs to watch out; if they undermine neutrality, they risk losing safe harbor and tax protections.

THIS IS GREAT! Gordon Smith (R-OR) is willing to enshrine the FCC's Policy Statement (4 very good neutrality principles) into a Bill -- and now this from Ron Wyden (D-OR)! I love Oregon! This is the greatest state in the USA!!!

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Dear Comcast,

I'm thrilled to see the likes of Scott Westerman, Frank Elaison, and even Charlie Douglas posting in the blogosphere -- without any hint of that marketing-written, legal-approved scripting. 

I've been doing this long enough to see this come and go.  You'll get an enthusiastic employee who, in good faith, writes something wrong.  Or you'll have an employee having a bad day who says too much about work on his personal blog.  As a result, a memo flies out of the corporate belly-button telling everybody to shut-up or ship-out.  

Talk happens. The guy in the Comcast van stops by every now and then and we chatter. A desk-jockey at the local office is also someone I talk to about things. Sometimes I ask, sometimes they volunteer, and sometimes they're not sure or don't have all the facts.

But, when that talk is online, there's something called "discoverable evidence" left behind and lawyers are afraid as hell about it. Someone ought to tell the lawyers that this is a business full of people and that people do things. The lawyers ought to be figuring out how to handle litigation in a real company of hard-working but sometimes misinformed people instead of a make-believe company where there are no people to say things wrong. ( Read more... )

Growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers’ P2P file-sharing services has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations.

Ono, a unique software solution that allows users to efficiently identify nearby P2P clients. The software, which is freely available and has been downloaded by more than 150,000 users, benefits ISPs by reducing costly cross-network traffic without sacrificing performance for the user. In fact, when ISPs configure their networks properly, their software significantly improves transfer speeds – by as much as 207 percent on average.

...read more...

Download and Install Ono using Azureus:  From the Advanced display, choose the Tools Plugins menu by selecting Ono from the Sourceforge plugins list.  Note that Ono does "phone home" by default to help the research gather anonymized performance data.  If this disturbs you, you can turn this option off.

The Constitution is not reviled by Conservatives, and it is the regulation that defines the very structure and limits (regulates) the power of government over a people.

There is nothing more conservative than the notion that "I should be left alone."  Don't unfairly tax me, don't over regulate me, don't spy on me, just leave me alone.

Conservatives, ask yourselves:  What is it that the American people -- the millions of us law-abiding folk that log on every day -- are asking for when we ask for network neutrality?

They say:
 - Don't give me less service than I pay for,
 - Don't regulate my choices of activies,
 - Don't spy on my activities,
 - Just leave me alone.

Why is that asking too much?  How does that stifle innovation?  It doesn't.  It's the CONSERVATIVE position that has made our Constitution the document that protects the weaker from the stronger, and it's made our country both diverse and great. 

The principle of Network Neutrality has made the Internet great because it does the same thing.  It limits how those with unlimited power can affect the network.  Net Neutrality was there from its design.  It -is already- the expressed U.S. Policy.  It's time to give it the power of law.

Robb Topolski

This recording is about 110 years old. From a (soft) brown wax cylinder, it's as clear as a bell!

Probing Question: What is Net neutrality? from PhysOrg.com

"Internet Freedom, under attack. What do we do? Stand up, talk back," shouted a group calling themselves the Raging Grannies, outside the Dinkelspiel Auditorium at Stanford University. Inside, the Federal Communications Commission prepared to hold a public hearing on broadband network management practices, a topic most people might not expect to draw protesters.

...(read more)...

Writes George Ou:

As many of you reading this blog probably already know, Comcast has been disconnecting a certain percentage of TCP streams emanating from BitTorrent and other P2P (peer-to-peer) seeders. This effectively delays and degrades the ability of Comcast customers to seed files using P2P applications. For normal healthy Torrents that are distributed across multiple users and multiple ISPs, losing a few seeders intermittently isn't too noticeable. But for rare Torrents or Torrents that have to originate from a Comcast broadband customer, this can pose some challenges. The rare Torrent becomes even less reliable than they already are while popular Torrents originating from Comcast's broadband network take much longer to become healthy.

While Comcast has stated they will try to move off of their Sandvine system that uses TCP resets by the end of this year, there's no guarantee that they will complete on schedule and there's no relief in the mean time for customers who are having a tough time seeding their files for distribution. Even without the challenges posed by TCP resets, seeding a torrent file is still problematic and burdensome. Not only does the seeder have to turn his/her computer in to a server, they must also allocate significant portions of their upstream bandwidth - as well as their neighbor's bandwidth which they share - to seeding while providing relatively minimal capacity to the Torrent.

http://tinyurl.com/5t8oht

Actually, I'm glad that George Ou posted a rebuttal to the testimony to the FCC, because I do owe him an apology. I misunderstood something and argued back that he was pointing out clearly allowed behavior. After replying the testimony, I see that I misunderstood what he said. In the end, the exchange added nothing to the debate. It's about 75% through this video. Nobody likes to be told that they're wrong when they're not wrong. Now that I've seen the video, I owe him the apology that I gave, regardless of the fact that we both were off track.

Dear George, I noticed that you consulted with Brett Glass and Richard Bennett before posting your article. You certainly have my permission to consult with me, too. Why should we be on completely opposing sides of this debate? You know how to find my phone number. FIRST, AN APOLOGY: At the Stanford hearing, you reported that some smart gateway/router devices know when a host behind it has gone offline, and will issue RSTs in lieu of forwarding to the known-offline host. At the hearing, I misunderstood what you were saying and I countered that you were describing behavior covered in the standards. While I don't know of any particular smart devices that do this, if they do (and it makes sense to me that they do so), then I was incorrect to counter you without acknowledging that gateway devices might do this exactly as you described. For that, I WHOLEHEARTEDLY APOLOGIZE. Had I understood your statement (which is clear enough in the video --- the fault of misunderstanding is all mine), the behavior you described is probably not in the standards (AFAIK). However, the device sending the RST is acting as the end point and was instructed to do so by some administrator. It was not a secret. It was not DPI changing the behavior of the Internet. As far as the Internet peers were concerned, the SYN-RST exchange was completely expected. The entire discussion ended appropriately when Professor Peha, countering both of us, made the entire discussion moot when he pointed out that these are not examples of using RST for congestion control. You weren't wrong in what you said. I WAS WRONG to dismiss it as errant and I apologize for doing so. SECOND: "P2P download typically used 10 to 30 TCP streams at the same time." This is essentially correct, but moot. Also the statement is true only for DOWNLOADING WITH BITTORRENT specifically. It is not true for eMule or Gnutella. It is not true while BitTorrent is only uploading. While partly true, the statement is completely unimportant. The important direction is the upload direction -- because the transmitting host handles congestion control on the Internet, because the last-mile congestion is the congestion we are discussing (this is the uploader's first mile), and because P2P uploads is what Comcast is tearing down. With BitTorrent, only 3-4 streams are allowed to upload simultaneously. This is a major flaw in YOUR testimony to the FCC and other bodies (I'm referring to your article and graphic showing a single connection comparison to 11 connections). Limiting the uploading connections to 3-4 is a specific feature of the BitTorrent protocol designed to prevent congestion by quickly responding to changing network conditions. See http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification#Choking_and_Optimistic_Unchoking to understand how this feature is designed to prevent congestion. THIRD: ... (see the the linked post for the rest)...

Respected blogger in an email to me: As for network management, I agree – and have written previously – that Comcast needs to do a better job of informing users of their policies. But beyond that, I’m less concerned about, say, blocking online video competitors. Comcast is reviled as it is, and large-scale blocking of competing services won’t do it any good in either the court of public opinion or in government offices; more blocking would only result in more pressure and more scrutiny. It’s probably not worth it for them to block in most instances. (And, I should note, if they do, they should obviously inform customers properly.) But even if they did, that just creates an even bigger incentive for other ISPs to swoop in and steal their customers. Yes, the market isn’t as competitive as everyone would like in some places – but poor service from Comcast will give other companies even greater reason to enter a market, and where local regulations make that difficult, might put pressure on local authorities to open up video and data services to greater competition.

My reply: There is no "swooping in" because there is no competition. I live in Hillsboro, Oregon -- we're called the Silicon Forest here because technology has replaced logging as a local industry. We're second only to the Silicon Valley as to the concentration of tech workers -- all of us pretty broadband hungry (it rains a lot here). Edit: My point is that if there was going to be an incentive to invest by additional wireline carriers, it would probably be happening right here! I own a home where my two choices are DSL at 768/128 (no longer considered Broadband) and Comcast up to 8 Mbps/768 Kbps. I also rent an apartment here (my adult daughter is using my house to raise her kids) where I have about 3 Mbps/256 as my DSL and the same Comcast choices. Beyond that, there are no broadband choices without prohibitive consumption caps (wireless). Competition is a pipedream or a nightmare. Let's say 12 competitors somehow are interested in serving my city. The city isn't going to allow 12 possible wireline competitors to individually tear up the streets and lay down cable or fiber next to Comcast's or Verizon's cable or fiber. The several junction boxes in each front yard would be a crazy site, too. Not to mention the constant stream of litigation resulting from claims of who damaged whose existing lines. Thank goodness it was just a dream -- it's never happened anywhere because people with capital weigh these risks as too likely and too expensive. I've read your blog and you're quite intelligent and you and I are more alike than different. I'm actually in a position of influence in this debate. I'm asking for: Promoting the FCC policy statement to the status of FCC Rule or US Law. I want it kept in its current (broadly worded) form so that both people and ISPs are free to approach "reasonableness" without having a politician try to define it ahead of time. As a policy statement, it was originally designed to be unenforceable (Martin said so when it was issued). Even though Martin has changed his opinion on the enforceability, it clearly has insufficient weight with some. I also want recognition that the FCC supports the established governing Internet bodies that set, maintain, and change the Internet Standards, and that anyone who wishes to change how the Internet works needs to approach and participate with these bodies.  In summary: obey the policy statement, follow the Internet Standards, and the government stays out of it. Violate these and both complainant and ISP can make their cases and the FCC simply adjudicates and enforces. This is not volumes of regulation -- it's a one pager. I don't want complete "Net Neutrality." Nobody thinks that their own P2P downloads should have equal footing with a neighbor's 9-1-1 "my house is on fire" VOIP call. The Internet has RFC 2474 (et. al.) which does discriminate based on the settings by the endpoint applications and the presence of congestion. VOIP is sent "top priority and reliability", P2P "background transfers" are sent like 4th class mail and everything else is handled as 1st class mail. The only reasons that ISPs don't use it is (1) they didn't invent it, so they don't trust it; (2) obscure-sounding free Internet Standard solutions don't arrive in 3-piece suits offering demos and lunches to non-technical executives; (3) they are told that RFC 2474 can be abused (always true with any technology) but that another solution is foolproof (always false with any technology). RFC 2474 allows prioritization without the ISP having to inspect packets and make arbitrary value decisions about what should go and what should be blocked. So, one like mind to another, how would you handle this if you were me?

Comments?

Here is a blog entry from someone who attended the FCC hearing at Stanford...he makes a great comparison that helps the layperson understand one of the key arguments...

Paragraph 6 from: Come and Spin the World Wide Web I keep hearing bandwidth referred to as a "scarce commodity". It's been argued that the market will find efficient ways of using this scarce commodity without regulation impeding their technology. Well, let's look again at another thing referred to as a scarce commodity: oil. Did the market find ways of maximizing the efficiency of our vehicles? The answer is no. The average mileage has barely changed since the 1985. The technology is finally starting to come, but let's not make the same mistake again. The technology was always there around the periphery, being held at arm's length by our industries, who wanted to use the older systems despite their inefficiency. That's where the money is.

Nice comparison!

Back in the hazy days of the beginning of the Internet, someone wrote parody lyrics to a famous song.  I searched for weeks for the author, but the search was fruitless.  Every reference to the song was a dead end road leading to someone who had collected it. 

My quartet specialized in parody songs -- which we usually write ourselves.  But I wanted to sing THESE LYRICS.  I wanted to sing it in shows sponsored by a company with a huge treasury -- which, I might put at risk should someone come out and say, "Hey, I wrote that!  Now pay me!"  Without ever finding the author, either we or our employer could find themselves facing both actual and punitive damages.

The lyrics are an example of an "Orphaned Work."  As the US Copyright office, the courts, and the law presently sit -- that an owner cannot be found is not an excuse for failing to get permission to use it. 

Most works like the one I wanted to use are trivial.  The owners are tickled to have their works heard, and don't want any money at all.  But most people aren't willing to take that risk, as the costs are so high if someone does show up and is able to prove authorship. 

I'm happy to read now, "Two orphan works bills were introduced to begin to bring balance back to copyright law - to help find owners and encourage new and creative uses of unexploited copyrighted works."

Please -- whisper in your Congress-critters ear that one of these bills need to be passed!  You can include this posting which explains why -- for free.  :-)

This is in reply to your blog post (Hebrew, which I do not read) which I found referred to in English on another mailing list.

Benhamo, Sir

Please excuse the English post on your blog.  I am digging into some of the Vuze data.  It does appear that Bezeqint addresses do have an interference source.  

I will be posting my Wireshark capture on my website in case you would like to examine it.  The file being shared is Ubuntu Hardy Haron.  Of particular note in this capture is that the IP TTL from the real peer is 114 and the forged, injected RSTs is 48.  This fact proves that the RSTs do not come from the peer itself.

I hope this helps all freedom-loving Bezeqint users fight this unwarranted man-in-the-middle attack.

Note: without comparison of logs on both sides of the peer connection, this evidence is not completely conclusive.  I collected this information on my Verizon DSL account, which I believe to be free of this type of interference. 

Sincerely,

Robb Topolski

Click the following links, in order...

1. "What a nice day!"

2. "Riding my bike, riding my bike, riding my bike ... Hey, what's that weird looking car following me for?"


3.  "Hey, watch it -- HEY! -- Owww.  OWWW! -- Son-of-a-OWWWW!!!!"

4.  "Cripes!"

5.  "Uhhhhhhhhh.... uhhhhhhhhhh.... I sure hope nobody saw that!"

I appear about 1/3rd the way through it. It's an easy 4 minutes catching many of the important aspects of the topic of Network Neutrality.

Today, Comcast Corporation and Pando Networks announced that they will lead the industry to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for users and ISPs.  With an FCC hearing on Comcast's anti-peer-to-peer practices scheduled for later this week, this is hardly a surprise. Once again, Comcast makes another sweetheart-sounding deal, but at the wrong time, and with the wrong sweetheart. 

It takes a special kind of arrogance for a company that sells Internet Access to team up with another company that sells Content Delivery and together decide what rights and responsibilities that the world's Internet users should have. 

As in its earlier "deal" with BitTorrent, Inc., Comcast's announcement today doesn't change any of the facts it faces: in 2006, it assured Congress that network neutrality laws were not necessary, saying it would not "deny, delay, or degrade" its customers in order to deal with traffic congestion.  Within a year it was caught secretly doing exactly that!  Even after a long string of deceptive and deflective statements and tactics, Comcast continues to degrade their traffic today.

As was the case in the BitTorrent "deal," neither Comcast Corporation nor Pando Networks represents the millions of customers and other members of the Internet community who were impacted when Comcast secretly launched its anti-P2P attack. 

Today's announcement comes less than 48 hours from the US Federal Communication Committee's public hearing at Stanford University.  There, the FCC is scheduled to hear from two panels of experts followed by two hours of public testimony on the Comcast incident specifically as well as similar industry practices in general. 

No doubt we will soon see Comcast and Pando Networking executives start to explain why today's "deal" signals that Network Neutrality regulation is not needed in the Broadband Marketplace. 

Robert M. "Robb" Topolski

I woke up this morning to this via Yahoo! Messenger ...

(4/15/2008 2:27:08 AM) lizzybeth22222: I am lizzybeth j john,I was Born and Raised In Arizona In Usa..Loc..300,mission road,sedona..I will Like to Describe Myself....I am 5;7fst,Brown Long hair,hazel eyes...130lbs...I am an Honest and Godfearing lady,Respect,Caring,Faithful,Loving,Sense of Humours...I was Born In Christain Family ...My Family BackGround...Catholic....I am Causain White.....Wht do U Like to do....I Like to cook,Readnovel,Movies,Dance,Music and go to beach with My right man.......I am Single Looking For Long term Relationship to spend the rest of my life with him in Happy home and settle down forever........I will like to know eachother better.....Like to hear from you....Bye..

I get two or three of these a week.  They're real people.  Usually, I politely say "thank you, but I'm not interested," and then I block them. 

I looked up the address, and it is a valid address in Sedona, but I don't think there's a beach nearby.  If she lives with Grandma and Grandpa, though, I think they're my kind of people!

Google's copyright chief warns of a "counter-reformation" by content owners who seek to crack down worldwide on liberal fair use rights.

"The purpose of the movement," he says in a recent blog post, "is to chill the willingness of countries to enact fair use or liberal fair dealing provisions designed to genuinely further innovation and creativity."

According to Patry, today "it is not enough to have vast rights: corporate content owners see a need to eliminate any limitations on those rights too."

Fortunately for consumers, copyright "protestants" are fighting back.

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Do you understand Network Neutrality? Do you understand that this very Internet is at stake? Please, take 10 minutes and watch this.

From the Vuze Blog, Jay Monahan, General Counsel for Vuze, explains that BitTorrent, Inc. does not represent Vuze nor its industry; nor do side (non-)agreements made by Comcast control the behavior of other Cable Internet companies. (Agreements made by Comcast hardly control the behavior of Comcast! [see pg 10])

Key excerpts from Vuze...

For years, Comcast engaged in definitional gymnastics by denying that it was blocking “particular companies or applications,” but all the while it was engaging in “man-in-the-middle” attacks intended to interfere with seeding activities of all bit-torrent protocol based applications, like Vuze.

BitTorrent Inc. itself represents only a fraction of the bit-torrent-based applications being used today, and has no control over the many millions of bit-torrent based applications on desktop computers around the world. I have little doubt that Comcast wanted its announcement to be perceived as a sort of universal resolution of its differences with the bit-torrent world, but nothing could be further from the truth.

When we filed our petition for rulemaking with the FCC in November, 2007, we stated that both regulation and meaningful industry cooperation are necessary to protect consumer rights and foster innovation. We still believe that. Whether you believe that Comcast’s cozying up to BitTorrent, Inc. arises out of genuine enlightenment or is just a publicity stunt, in my view it changes nothing in terms of our original Petition.

--
Robb Topolski -= funchords.com =- Hillsboro, Oregon
FCC Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet - Thursday, April 17th - Stanford Univ., Calif.